Posts Tagged ‘Muslim Brotherhood’

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president and the country’s most famous stand-up, has confessed he feels “isolated’ politically but world leaders actually envy him because he says what he thinks. If that is not enough to challenge the best psychologist in the world, he also stated, “I don’t care about being alone in the eyes of the world. What matters is how the people view me,” referring to voters who he thinks are thrilled at their leader being snubbed. The Turkish Cihan News quoted him as telling journalists during a tour of Latin America:

We saw [how people see me] during the presidential election that people sided with me. And there’s no isolation when you consider other countries’ people as well.

Maybe there is an isolation on the level of leaders, but it’s nothing other than envy. Erdoğan said he once had great relations with President Barack Obama but just can’t understand how things went sour. He dumped Israel in 2009, ran into the waiting arms of Iranian President Mohammed Ahmadinejad and Iranian ally Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, at the same time Washington began to finally understand that the Iranian nuclear threat was real. So what is Erdoğan’s conclusion about his relations with Obama?

We had one-on-one meetings. After all these talks, we see that things started to develop in a different way, which I could not understand.

And does Erdoğan, think that President Obama envies him? Does Obama play golf better than Obama? The Turkish president recently has had a bit of criticism of Obama and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Obama’s sin, according to Erdoğan, was that he did not call last week’s murders of three Muslims in North Carolina an attack on Islam, even though the three Muslims who were shot and killed did not appear to have stemmed from a long-running parking dispute and without any link to religion. Erdoğan also cannot understand why the world “is not speaking out against” al-Sisi, whose regime has sentenced to death 183 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of Erdoğan’s favorite friends, along with Hamas. Erdoğan said, “When you speak out about these issues you are left alone, but not in the eyes of the people,” which says a great deal about the man on the street in Turkey.

In a particularly pointed interview conducted with Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi by German journalists, Sisi called for a “reformation” of Islam, said that ISIS and all other Islamic extremists descended from the Muslim Brotherhood, and agreed that true Muslims must take action against the extremists who are hurting other Muslims as well as insulting Allah.

Sisi was asked about his recent talk at Egypt’s al-Azhar University in which he called for a kind of reformation in Islam. He explained that there is a problem now because while “the Koran represents the absolute truth,” there are differing interpretations of it. Sisi proposed at the Azhar conference that “wrong and distorted ideas” be removed from the religious discourse.

The subject of the conference was “freedom of choice,” and Sisi said “the right to choose a particular faith, whether Christian, Jewish or Muslim is an inherent part of our religion.”

In addition to simply removing the false interpretations of Islam, Sisi agreed that Muslims must take action against those who falsely interpret their religion, in other words, they must be willing to confront those extremists who are distorting Islam.

While Sisi was prepared to go where a few – but only a few – other Muslim leaders dared to go on this topic, he was more than open to the softball pitch by the German journalists when they asked whether ISIS or the Muslim Brotherhood was the greater threat.

Sisi’s response may not have been the one U.S. President Obama would have wished for, but it could not have been a surprise. He said that the two terrorist groups are essentially the same, they “share the same ideology.” However, as far as Sisi is concerned, the Muslim Brotherhood spawned all the other current Islamic extremist groups, including ISIS.

President Obama has recently been harshly criticized for having visitors at the White House who, as members of the “political wing” of the Muslim Brotherhood, had been members of the former Egyptian government.

The Egyptian president tied the Muslim Brotherhood’s fundamentalist belief that terrorists ascend to paradise when they die as martyrs as the progenitor for modern Islamic terrorism.

The journalists repeatedly jabbed Sisi with charges of oppression and denial of human rights under his administration, each time pointing to specific examples.

At least as reflected in the transcript of the interview, Sisi handled the accusations calmly. He offered as explanations for the critical views of what he has had to do in his country to cultural differences or naive perceptions of reality in one of the most troubled regions of the world.

Egypt has officially banned Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliate that operates in the Gaza Strip, and named it a terrorist organization.

An Egyptian court entered the decree on Saturday, Jan. 31, based on reports that Hamas aided Muslim Brotherhood operatives in Egypt carry out terrorist attacks against the Egyptian government, by smuggling weapons from the Gaza Strip into Egypt.

Egypt elected Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, following the Egyptian revolution in 2011, which removed former President Hosnai Mubarak. The Hamas leadership was strongly supportive of Morsi.

Within a short period of time there was a backlash against Morsi for making sweeping changes to Egyptian laws and regulations, in accordance with strict Islamic rule of the radical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. Morsi was removed from office by the Egyptian military, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who was subsequently elected president.

“The court ruled to ban the (Hamas) Qassam Brigades and to list it as a terrorist group,” said Judge Mohamed al-Sayid of the special Cairo court which deals with urgent cases.

In addition to denouncing the Egyptian court’s decision, Hamas retaliated by stating it would no longer accept Egypt as a broker between it and Israel, Reuters reported.

U.S. President Barack Obama had essentially knighted Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated president with being the official enforcer of the Israeli-Hamas “peace” agreement which ended an armed conflict in November, 2012. At the time, Obama said he “reaffirmed the close partnership between the United States and Egypt, and welcomed President Morsi’s commitment to regional security.”

But Morsi and his close Hamas relationship was not what the Egyptian people wanted, and the current Egyptian President has now ousted Hamas as well as the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Egyptian court ruled after coordinated terrorist attacks against Egyptian military and police sites in the Sinai Peninsula left more than 25 people dead earlier in the week.

Egypt has freed the sons of Hosni Mubarak from jail while security forces killed around 20 people, mostly Islamists, protesting on the fourth anniversary of the anti-Mubarak uprising that has left the country with the same kind of dictatorship under a different name.

Gamal and Alaa Mubarak had been in jail for nearly four years until a judge last week ordered them to be freed after they were exonerated on charges of embezzlement

Their father Hosni Mubarak had ruled Egypt with an iron fist until the “Arab Spring” swept into Egypt in the middle of the winter four years ago and, with the open support of the Obama administration, forced him to resign.

A temporary military regime replaced him and continued his legacy of murdering opponents. The Muslim Brotherhood, again with the blessings of Washington, took over after “democratic” elections that to this day are questioned concerning the veracity of the results.

Another uprising forced out the Muslim Brotherhood regime, and Egypt now is under the thumb of former general and now President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, whose security forces “celebrated” the uprising for freedom earlier this week by killing 19 or 20 protesters, depending on which report you want to believe. A policeman also was killed.

Sisi last year announced an outline for democratic reforms, which apparently do not allowed for street demonstrations against his regime.

Now that Mubarak’s sons have been cleared of charges of corruption, the most glaring results of the uprising are more than a thousand graves in the cemetery.

Is the Hamas terrorist organization about to set up a new international headquarters in Turkey?

Top Hamas terror officials denied a flurry of media reports Monday that the group’s political bureau chief, Khaled Mashaal, was expelled by long-time patron, Qatar.

At the same time, Israel’s foreign ministry issued a statement welcoming those same reports.

Hamas sources told CNN earlier in the day that members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which spawned the terrorist organization, had also been expelled.

All were now on their way to Turkey together with Mashaal, according to the report.

However, Qatar-based senior Hamas official Izzat Risheq denied the report, and the Qatari government declined to comment.

Historically, Qatar has been a long-time supporter of both the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.

However, political alliances are everything in the Middle East, and Egypt’s star is on the rise. Cairo’s increasingly popular military-backed President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi deposed his Muslim Brotherhood-backed predecessor. Sisi followed the coup by offering to include the Brotherhood in his new government, but when that peace offering resulted in fresh violence, he outlawed the group.

During the Egyptian-brokered negotiations for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas last summer, numerous players were peripherally involved. Hamas was heavily guided by Qatar, which welcomed the Mashaal and his followers when they fled their Damascus headquarters at the start of the Syrian civil war. Also involved in guiding Hamas wasTurkey, another passionate supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

But both Saudi Arabia and Jordan opposed any direct participation by those nations in the talks, as did Egypt, the United States and Israel herself.

Qatar has also recently come under pressure from the international community to halt its role as a center of service for terrorist groups and other radical Islamist organizations in the Middle East.

Communications via envoys between Qatar and Saudi Arabia have resulted in a quiet understanding that Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood must seek a new home for its headquarters “abroad.”

On December 27, Mashaal attended a congress of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, where he praised the nation’s Islamist leaders and said he hoped to “liberate Palestine” with Turkey.

Last week, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah fell ill with pneumonia; it remains to be seen whether, and if so, how the monarch’s weakened state may affect Qatar’s decisions and actions in the coming days.

Egypt has deployed heavy security around foreign embassies in Cairo because of increased fears of terrorist attacks, according to the Saudi daily Ukaz.

Authorities said that terrorists from the Sinai are planning to attack an embassy and that the Muslim Brotherhood is planning to strike several targets throughout Egypt to undermine the Al-Sisi regime.

Some two dozen members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan were arrested ten days ago in connection with accusations of smuggling arms and money into Judea and Samaria.

According to an article published Monday by the Jordanian Al-Hayat newspaper, the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood was also charged with creating a secret armed organization.

Two members were also accused of carrying out training in Gaza — and attempting to train operatives to carry out attacks in Judea and Samaria.

Sources in Jordan, meanwhile, revealed that the name of Turkey-based high-ranking Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri continues to reappear during investigations of the terror-related activities. Al-Arouri’s name has come up several times over the past year, most prominently in connection with the abduction and murder of three yeshiva teens in Gush Etzion by Hamas terrorists in June this past summer.

Al-Arouri’s name also came up during the questioning of the current Muslim Brotherhood suspects in connection with their activities. Al-Arouri, however, has stated that Hamas – which was founded by the Muslim Brotherhood – does not operate in Jordan at a military level. A report by the Aljazeera news network confirmed that 25 members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan were arrested after several were caught red-handed trying to smuggle weapons in the Palestinina Authority

The Jordanian officer involved in the case noted in his report that it appears two of the suspects had been trained for their roles in Gaza.